Succulents and More™

The other day I walked into my greenhouse , perfectly relaxed and certainly not expecting anything bad. Imagine how p***ed I was when this greeted me: It got worse from there... ...much worse: Nothing left here! Weirdly enough, nothing else was eaten, just these Astrophytum cactus — and there definitely are other tasty morsels in the greenhouse. I don’t “collect” a lot of plants, but I did collect these astrophytums. I knew immediately who the culprit was. It’s always the same one. It starts with an r, has an a in the middle, and ends with a t. Let me spell it out: r-a-t. If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you might know that rats are my arch nemesis. They’ve done more damage in our garden over the years than anything else. Not just ornamentals: More than ¾ of the vegetables and herbs my wife planted in recent weeks have been gnawed down to stubs. Poison traps aren’t an option because of Stella, and I don’t love the idea of live traps: What am I going to do with a trap...

One of the highlights of my Easter trip to Portland was a visit to Little Prince of Oregon, a wholesale nursery in Aurora, south of Portland. Their plants are in garden centers and retail nurseries all over the West Coast, easily recognizable by their colorful plant tags featuring a crowned frog: Usually wholesale operations aren’t set up for visitors, especially for Joe Blows like myself, but Loree worked her magic and arranged for a tour with production manager Mike Hicks and propagation assistant Ann Amato (who is also a personal friend of both of us). For most people, visiting a wholesale nursery would be the very definition of boring — lots and lots of plants, mostly small, crammed together on tables or the floor. But for plant nerds, it’s like getting to see the inner workings of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Living Little Prince sign — a perfect use for sempervivums (Left to right) Production manager Mike Hicks, yours truly, Ann, and Max from Oakland (see his and his husba...